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Her eraser wears down even further as Tina leaves a hole on the page where half of a word once rested. Clearing off the pinkish rubber bits, she sighs, flips her pencil, and begins again.
She can’t start a sentence without thinking about the next, and none of them sound right together. When she tries to hang onto a thought, a louder one screams for her attention but never with advice for the first.
If the story begins in a quaint village, how will her character ever run into Sir Jimmelot the Junior? Can she realistically incorporate a miscommunication plot when she’s already created a magic system for transferring letters?
The never-ending questions plague her until they fester into something much worse. Tina can feel the fog in her mind turn stormy, and harmless technical dilemmas become harbingers of doubt.
A real writer can fix these no problem.
A real writer can focus.
A real writer puts words on a page.
Currently, Tina can’t do any of those. The logical conclusion is she’s not a real writer, and it hurts.
Groaning, Tina lets her head fall to the desk beneath her with a thunk. Still, the whispers in her mind rage on, despite the slight thudding of Tina’s head against her journal. She shoves her chair away from her desk and stands. Inspecting her bedroom, she finds no inspiration, and the voices amplify from whispers to shrieks so suddenly it gives her whiplash.
She needs to get out of here. She needs to get out now.
Snatching a coat to throw over her pajamas, Tina leaves her bedroom in a huff to find the rest of the apartment fast asleep. With a stop by the kitchen, maybe hoping to see Gene in the fridge or maybe Dad talking to the oven again, Tina finds it empty. She checks the time on the stove then subtracts an hour because that clock is never right.
One in the morning. No wonder everything’s actually quiet.
Tiptoeing to the stairs, Tina reassures her conscience that she’s only going out for a quick second.
Her room’s too hot. It’s stifling. Sweltering even.
A bit of fresh air is good for teenagers. Kids spend so much time on their phones these days after all, and she doesn’t want to end up like them.
One in the morning isn’t that late. In Minneapolis, it’s still midnight, which is basically eleven.
With a final nod, Tina descends the stairs, careful of the creaking.
“Basically eleven,” she whispers to herself.
In the past, sneaking out usually meant with someone or with a task to accomplish. Not this time though, she thinks as she slips through the front door and closes it softly behind her. The click still sounds too loud, especially combined with the scrape of her shoes that kick at loose gravel she can’t see on the dark sidewalk.
Tina comes from a family of heavy sleepers, so she likely won’t wake anyone. If anything, she’s more worried about disturbing their rest than being caught.
Would anyone notice she’s gone?
Stopping as suddenly as the thought hits, Tina looks back at her quiet home. She can’t see any movement, and no sixth sense informs her of a presence—not that she’s that in tune with her sixth sense anyway.
Tina takes another step away from the restaurant. Alarms don’t sound, lights don’t flicker on, she can’t hear a dog bark for miles. And she realizes she’s really on her own.
Night air always feels different, and Tina adjusts to the sharp chill as she moves on. It’s a chill that strikes her as cleansing rather than cold.
Closing her eyes, she breathes.
For something she supposedly does all the time, it’s amazing how much this breath seems like her first. The self-doubt, the anxiety, the dark fog holding her captive begins to seep out of Tina’s head like tendrils of smoke.
At the quiet roar of an airplane slicing through the clouds overhead, Tina opens her eyes to watch the blinking dot trek across the sky. She doesn’t turn away until it’s outside of her field of vision.
Though she’s already let go of so much of the turmoil keeping her awake, Tina keeps walking towards the Wharf. A quick stop by the beach won’t hurt anybody. As far as she can see, the entire night is still: no cabs, no drunks, no raccoons even.
A shadowy creature scurrying in her peripherals causes her to jump.
Okay, maybe a few raccoons, she corrects.
Looking both ways before crossing an empty street, Tina’s in front of the gates of Wonder Wharf in no time. The ferris wheel, tops of booths, and just a hint of that devil statue peek out from above the walls. Tina moves on, shuddering at the typically cackling plastic head struck silent, frozen in open-mouthed terror.
The clown isn’t that bad, she reminds herself. It helped them find their father under the pier after all.
Her strides are quick but without any nervous pause because she’s old enough to know about dangers in the dark but not old enough to truly fear them.
Without a conscious thought driving them, Tina’s feet lead her to the Glencrest Yacht Club. The waves lap at the tethered boats in their private marina. While she’s not interested in finding out if Glencrest has night security to drag her away for admiring the physical embodiment of a midlife crisis, Tina doesn’t think beefy guards would mind her using the stairs to the side and away from the boats.
Although, Tina thinks and stops halfway down the stairs, if they were hot teen boy security guards…
She shakes her head and continues her journey down to the rocks that are big and flat enough to sit on. Finding one she vaguely remembers from the time they discovered plankton, Tina plants herself far above the water, though high tide had already started to recede.
“Better to be on the safe side of a tide, am I right?” Tina heh-d at her own rhyme and looked around for someone to laugh with her. Of course, she sees no one. Even if an invisible person lurks nearby, she doubts they will enjoy her sense of humor. No one does.
The doubt creeps in again.
It’s her dad she thinks of first when she wants to banish the harsh voices. He snorts at her jokes when he hears them. He tells her she’s great. He wouldn’t want her beating herself up like this.
Closing her eyes, Tina breathes in time with the ocean. The rock under her is smooth save for the bits of algae tickling her ankles, and the air smells crisp with a hint of salt. No seagulls are awake to interrupt the sound of the waves rising and falling in steady rhythm.
She focuses on her feelings, not her thoughts, and the first mental image to surface is of a pot on a stove. She knows instinctively that if she takes the lid off the pot, the water will boil over. Instead, Tina turns down the heat.
It’s okay if no one laughs at my jokes. I think they’re funny regardless.
The flame lowers.
It’s okay if I don’t write today. It doesn’t mean I’ll never write again.
The flame lowers more.
It’s okay if I ask what I need rather than forcing myself into something I’m not in the right space for. I love me, and I deserve to show myself patience.
The flame extinguishes.
Tina’s mental hand lifts the lid, but only steam escapes. The boiling water simmers a few seconds more before settling. She’s safe to open her eyes again, and—of course—she breathes.
Tears well but don’t fall. Even without the relief of a good cry, Tina feels renewed and light.
And, suddenly… very sleepy...
-
Poke.
“Hey. Hey you.”
Poke poke.
“Are you dead?”
Tina opens her eyes to a man with a litter stick poking at her shoe. At the sight of her waking up, the man jumps back and screams.
“Ahh!”
“Ahh!” Tina shoots up and joins him with her one note scream that’s just as good as other people’s screams. It does the job anyway, startling the man into dropping his poker onto his own foot.
“Ow!” The man kicks the stick for daring to land on him, but he only hurts his toe further. Swallowing his grimace, he looks back at Tina. “You know, you really should be more careful about where you take a nap.”
Taking off her glasses to rub the sleep from her eyes, Tina groans and stands. She returns the glasses to their rightful place on the bridge of her nose and gets a better look at the man who woke her. She recognizes him as a carnie, the new uniform Fischoeder enforced giving it away. In the light of day, Tina can read his name tag spelling out “Owen” clearly.
Wait. Daylight?
“But I guess I should be thankful,” Owen continues, unaware of the new dread building inside Tina. “You could have been a dead body. Those creep me out.”
“Uhhhh how many dead bodies have you found on the beach?”
“Ohh, pssh, you know... uhh gosh like fff- or maybe sspsh- okay none. But that’d be pretty creepy, right?”
“Yeah, pretty creepy,” Tina says, momentarily distracted. “Hey, if you work for Mr. Fischoeder, why are you picking up litter for Glencrest?”
“That’s a secret. Don’t tell Mr. Fish I’m moonlighting, okay? Or, I guess seven in the morning-ing.”
“Seven in the gosh darn morning?!”
Without another word, Tina dashes off her rock and to the stairs. She slips once.
“I’m okay,” she calls out, then begins sprinting home with her arms by her side as she yells, “aaahhh.”
Barely stopping for pedestrians or traffic, Tina races for the apartment. There’s a chance her family is still asleep. It’s a Saturday after all.
No such luck, Tina realizes as she rounds the corner and finds Gene on the sidewalk. Instead of his keyboard, he’s set up a few empty paint buckets Mr. Huggins threw out the day before, turning them into a makeshift drum set.
She slows down, wearily checking for the rest of her family. When he finally notices her careful approach, her brother smiles and waves with a meat tenderizer.
“Oh hey, it’s you! Slide on over here and give these mamma jammas a whirl,” Gene says. He taps at one of the buckets with a wooden spoon while holding the meat tenderizer out in Tina’s direction.
“Gene? What are you doing out here?”
He shrugs, resuming his tapping when Tina doesn’t take the offered tool. He’s trying to be quiet, or at least Gene Quiet with softish beats, as he answers her.
“Well, I got hungry and went to have a late-night slash early morning nibble. Then I thought to myself ‘what good is making an aesthetically pleasing cheese tray if there’s no one to see it,’ so I went to your room to eat in front of you.”
“Uh huh.” Tina knows the drill.
“But then you weren’t there, so I went to Louise, but she didn’t know where you were so we called Jimmy Jr and Zeke and Susmita and Tammy, who does NOT like being woken up by the way, and they didn’t know either.”
“Gene. Why are you out here?”
“Oh,” he says and shrugs again, finally ceasing his tapping. “We formed a search party and have been looking for you for like… hours, maybe? I’m not sure. They put me at base camp because Mom and Dad thought I’d forget what we were doing.”
Gene looks down at the mountain of buckets he’s trying to balance at different angles for new sounds. “I suppose they maaayybeee had a point.”
“What? Hours??” Tina’s frown etches into her face as the guilt carves through her.
Peering into the smudged glass of the restaurant, she sees no one to reassure that she’s alright.
“Well, yeah, you didn’t have a phone, so no one could just text you. Oh wait!” He takes out the emergency phone. “I’m supposed to send out the homing rocket if you show up. Like Jake Gyllenhaal in October Sky. Or a flashy receptionist for sailors.”
Gene begins to text as Tina’s mind races. Wiping off the sweat from her palms that accumulated too suddenly, Tina keeps brushing her coat when she remembers how nice the repetitive motion feels.
She is definitely getting grounded for this. Why is being a teenager so complicated, dang it?
“Hey uh, T?”
Tina looks up from her internal monologue to see her brother shifting his weight from foot to foot. He finally puts a hand on her shoulder.
“I know I’m Sir Jokes-A-Lot most of the time, but I just wanted you to know that I’m really glad you’re okay.”
“Oh, Gene, I didn’t mean to-”
“Gene! You have to answer when we call. What does ‘flare noise’ even- TINA!”
Louise interrupts herself and sprints ahead of their mom, a green and pink blur slamming into Tina. Though her fists are tiny, they’ll definitely leave bruises with how tight Louise bunches her hands in Tina’s shirt.
“Don’t you EVER do that again! Wake me up or leave a note dammit! You didn’t even put anything in your diary. How is ‘an ode to pear bottomed teens’ supposed to help us find you?!”
Tina hears the tell-tale crack in her sister’s voice but ignores it for the younger one’s sake. Usually so brave and in charge, it can be easy to forget that Louise is still a little girl—a little girl that loves her sister enough to crush ribs apparently.
“I’m- oof- sorry,” Tina manages, straining against the constriction of Louise’s grip. “Really. I promise I’ll keep my diary updated.”
Releasing Tina, Louise pushes her sister away, kicks at nothing, and coughs into her hand.
“Yeah well… good. Because these guys were worried.”
Louise juts her thumb behind her and indicates to Linda, who still stands where they first spotted each other. The older woman finishes clicking out a message and flips her phone shut.
Tina can already hear the “you teeny Tina troublemaker” and smothering of frenzied forehead kisses coming her way, but the phone’s default ringtone starts to play. Exasperated, Linda points a finger in warning at her children then answers the call. Even from a distance, Tina can hear both sides of the conversation.
“Is she hurt? Do you need a doctor? I know where Dr. Juarez lives. A chiropractic degree is a little different from a medical degree, but I’m sure he could-”
“TeddyTeddy, easy, sweetie. She’s fine. That’s why I said you could go home, search party’s over.”
As Linda continues to reassure Teddy, Gene uses the wooden spoon drumstick to tap Tina’s arm. “You should have seen Teddy when he got here. He had the nervous rubber legs of a young Elvis.”
“In the body of old Elvis,” Louise finishes. “But you gotta give it to him. He’s been driving around like crazy. I think this proves you’re his favorite.”
“Mmhmm,” Gene agrees.
“Driving?” Tina asks, uneasy. If she hears a single detail more of someone needlessly worrying about her, she’s sure she’ll throw up.
“Yeah, he took the further parts of town while Mom and me were on foot,” Louise explains. “Dad was a little closer. You know our jalopy wouldn’t survive the potholes on 15th.”
“Yeeaah of course you can come over for breakfast!” Linda’s voice vibrates with excitement. “We’ll have runny away eggs, HA! Okay, see you soon, hon. I’m gonna hug my crazy daughter.”
However, Linda’s love storm is once again interrupted by a thundering pair of heavy footsteps. Her dad arrives, sweaty, out of breath and barely able to stand.
-
Wheezing as he rounds the corner, Bob thinks to himself he… reaaallyy shouldn’t have started running the second he parked the car.
But good dads run to their kids when they need them, and Bob wants to be a good dad.
A good-ish dad, he thinks as his lungs burn.
“C is passing,” he whimpers then succumbs to his leg cramp.
Tina and family in sight, Bob lets himself fall to the ground near Linda. She crouches down next to him, hand on his wet back and already cooing something he can’t make out over his panting.
On one hand, he’s out of shape, and the quick breaths and achy muscles make complete sense for a man in his condition. On the other hand, his daughter didn’t sleep at home last night, and there’s no fear that could ever match that.
He peers up again at the kids. Gene, likely moving on already, hits at the buckets Bob pointed out to keep the boy occupied. At the sight of his meat tenderizer being repurposed, Bob hums but lets the annoyance go as quickly as it came. Louise looks over at him every once in a while, but she’s not leaving Tina’s side. Who knew something could overcome his youngest’s typical need to make fun of him.
Tina’s a wreck, though her face barely changes. The hands that won’t stop wiping at her coat reveal her discomfort. If he was any closer, he could probably hear her groaning.
From what he can tell, she’s safe.
But she could have not been, and that’s what’s blurring his vision.
“Bob, Bobby, it’s okay.” He can finally hear Linda over his wheezing. “She’s okay. It’s okay.”
“But she- it wasn’t-”
“I know, I know. This is what teenagers do, Bobby. They run away to see if you’ll come after them. It’s all that unconditional love crap we’re so good at,” Linda jokes.
“You weren’t this calm… when Louise ran away,” Bob manages.
“That was Louise, and this is Tina. Different kids need different things. And our Tina’s a special girl who needs us right now.”
Bob wipes his face on his sleeve, leaving a ton of sweat, maybe a tear or two, and way too much snot. Linda, strong and capable Linda who so perfectly straddles the line between unconventional and crazy, gives him a final pat on the back.
“Now come on,” she says standing up. “We also gotta go be bad cop so she knows we’re still her parents.”
“Can you... be bad cop without me?”
He just wants to hold her, and Linda understands. Helping Bob to his feet through the symphony of joint popping, she snorts.
“I can do that. But you’re pitching the combined birthday idea without me in the room.”
“Deal.”